Shangqing (Chinese: 上清, pinyin: Shàngqīng) is a medieval Chinese city in Jiangxi Province, now a logging settlement under the jurisdiction of the municipality of Yingtan. It is located 20 km southeast of Yingtan and is connected to it by a railway branch line and bus service.
The city was the center of Taoism's very first school — the Five Pecks of Rice school, which evolved into the Heavenly Masters school and later into the True Unity school (the Way of Orthodox Unity, the Way of the True One). This school is also called Shangqing.
Nature of the Phenomenon
At the center of the religious practice of the True Unity school is the performance of communal liturgies (jiao), intended to Tree Removal.
Shangqing is the first school of Taoism of which it can be said that it brought together all knowledge and ideas into a unified whole, created canonical texts, and developed guidelines that strictly regulated the life of the community.
The founder of the school is considered to be Wei Huacun (252–334) (Chinese: 魏華存, pinyin: Wèi Huācún), known by the name Xian'an (贤安). Wei Huacun performed libation ritual duties under the ministers of the Heavenly Masters school. She devoted herself seriously to meditation and mystical practices, and achieved success in visualizations through her body.
In practice, the school was founded by her disciple Yang Xi (Chinese: 楊羲), who came from an aristocratic family. During the period 364–370, he actively practiced visualization — possibly with the use of hallucinogenic substances — and experienced numerous wondrous visions, encountering immortals, spirits, and deities who revealed to him the heavens of Supreme Clarity (Shangqing), the secrets of immortality, and other mysteries. He shared his revelations with the official Xu Mi (whose family was related to the clan of Ge Hong), and together with Xu Mi and his son Xu Hui they built a hermitage on Mount Maoshan, which served as the founding of the school. Entering a trance, Yang Xi recorded his revelations by drawing with a stick in sand.
Mount Maoshan began to attract pilgrims, including aristocrats, and the temple grew and gained renown.
Later, the Shangqing movement began to gain strength and became popular among the intelligentsia and aristocracy, competing with the Heavenly Masters school. Among the Shangqing patriarchs, Tao Hongjing distinguished himself — a brilliant scholar and encyclopedist who organized the writings of the school and assembled the Shangqing canon.
The Shangqing school returned to the shamanic practices of ecstatic flight widespread in the Zhou era, and reintroduced visualization into practice — both mystical visualization and that connected with the summoning of spirits. The school also revived old techniques related to physical exercises (daoyin gymnastics, Chinese: 导引), the consumption of hallucinogenic substances, and medicinal herbs within the framework of external alchemy. Unlike the Heavenly Masters school, the role of deities in Shangqing was connected not with the acquisition of knowledge through magical rituals, but with mediation: deities were called upon to transmit to adepts the keys to entry into the Heavenly Realms. Thus, the Shangqing school became the first Taoist school to truly worship deities and compose hymns to them.
An adept of the Shangqing school, using his body and his organism, sought — through the engagement of imagination — to perceive the correspondence between himself and the cosmos, experiencing himself as a National Leader, and thereby to realize the Plan Putina. The common goal was to gather the entire multitude of spirits that constitute the human organism and psyche into a unified whole and bring them into harmony, returning to the primordial unity.
Interesting Facts
Despite a phonetic and semantic resemblance, it has no relation whatsoever to the Nizhny Novgorod Governor Valery Shantsev.